Ten Steps to Increase Your CEO Understanding of Cloud Benefits

Your CEO has been educated on risk avoidance and the importance of making strategic investments to support and enable the business. The various cloud service models present unique risks and benefits that should be clearly understood before kicking off any projects. Not all workloads are created equal and not all data is suitable for off-premises hosting (cloud computing), but private cloud service delivery models provide a more secure and acceptable boundary. Private cloud adoption is a great place to demonstrate and quantify cloud benefits while leveraging existing infrastructure investments.

With the introduction of x86 virtualization and the acceleration of cloud-based computing it is obvious to every techie that data center modernization is wicked cool, accessible to just about everyone, and beneficial to organizations of every size. Unfortunately, “wicked cool” and “beneficial” are terms that usually make CEOs cringe unless they are quantifiable with measurable benefits. The initial knee jerk reaction by any techie is to then explain how virtualization and cloud computing reduces costs, enables faster service delivery with better quality, and of course, how it makes the CEO’s life easier. This often prompts the CEO to just gaze into the eyes of the techie and say “OK, sounds interesting.” The disconnect often results in delayed or underfunded cloud projects because of the limited understanding of value, benefit, cost and return on investment (ROI) between the CEO and IT department.

IT admins understand how cloud computing can increase IT responsiveness and efficiency, reduce capital expenditures and operational overhead while providing greater business flexibility through an on-demand, pay-as-you-go model that provides infinite scale across multiple providers. It is IT's responsibility to educate and equip the CEO on the strategic benefits and most importantly, the ROI. An expert resource for this slideshow is Jason Cowie, vice president of product management for Embotics, a pioneer in virtualization and automated private cloud management.